Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Here's a layout/prelim done for a complicated page in Legacies, where there are lots of characters saving lots of people. This issue was written for George Perez, who had to bow out, and he handles these scenes much better than I can. I did my best:)

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Here's a cover sketch I really liked, that was not chosen, for the JLA/Planetary crossover I drew about ten years ago. I wound up doing a fair number of sketches for this project, which I will post another time. This also started from a small bounding box at the middle of the page, but I felt the view was too close-up, so I drew past that line, to make it a full figure shot. Then whited out the smaller inset lines. Shows the organic nature of drawing.

Monday, December 19, 2011

This was done as a variant cover for the last issue of Action Comics, #904, I think. Anyhow, the Doomsday here is an evolved version, and I just couldn't wrap my brain around the costume or the reference I had, so I didn't feel the confidence in drawing this one. If you compare the printed version, you can see I was altering stuff up until the end. The file I sent to the editor was flopped, and cropped as well, by me. But it all worked out in the end.

Superman and all related characters are trademark and copyright 2011 by DC Comics 2011.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Here's a cover sketch for issue#3 of Avengers: Domination Factor, a miniseries I wrote and drew a few years back. Dan Jurgens did the companion mini, Fantastic Four: Domination Factor, with the story intersecting, and then resolved in both books. It was a really fun project to do, and always fun to collaborate with Dan.

Avengers and all related characters are trademark and copyright 2011, Marvel Entertainment.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Here's a neat cover sketch for Tom Strong #5, that wound up as the prelim to finish the cover. Scott Dunbier had tried to get me to do some Tom Strong before this, but here I got to draw a great little story that Alan Moore wrote for me. This was the first of many Tom Strong jobs I did, and it was a great experience. Scott, as an editor is such an art fan, he's a guy you try hard to impress:)

Monday, December 5, 2011

Here's another drawing, shaded with Copic markers, that I did in some down-time. I'm liking the way these work, and I feel like I'm getting the hang of them finally. May be time to buy some color Copics!

Sunday, November 27, 2011

I'm showing a prelim with the final line art below, for the second Shazam poster done for DC Direct in the early 90's, when posters were a good selling item at comic stores. The line art for this was pretty large, as I wanted to draw it close to print size. The color part was done smaller, on a process called blue-line, which was a way of doing painted art and preserving the crispness of the black line art, by having the color on a board, and a film shot from the line art as an overlay, so it could be photographed separately, and combined in the printing stage. Sometimes the color and line art didn't stay perfectly registered with each other, and you'd see a little blue outline in the printed piece. When I worked blue-line in commercial art, the blue-line was always printed on heavy illustration board, to minimize any shrinking, or buckling of the surface, as that could screw up the way the line art film matched up. DC always did blue-lines on 2 or 3-ply paper, at least on my projects.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Here's the original sketch for Adventures of Superman#446, done for editorial approval. This one features Gangbuster kicking butt, while Superman looks on, symbolically. Another cover that went smoothly from this stage to finished art, and one of my faves. See previous blog-posts for an image of the color guide.

Adventures of Superman and all related characters are trademark and copyright DC Comics 2011

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Here's the marker prelim I used to paint the cover to Power of Shazam#5, with Mary Marvel and Madame Libertine.

In the finished cover, I flopped the composition. I may have drawn the composition this way at the start, I don't recall, but often I will tighten a layout on the reverse side of the tracing paper, to correct proportions where needed. Paint done in Dr Martin's Watercolor Dyes, Prismacolor pencils, and probably some gouache in spots as well.

Power of Shazam and all related characters are trademark and copyright DC Comics 2011

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Here's the cover prelim for a cover, done in 1996, when DC's Annuals theme was Legends of the Dead Earth , where each title showed a kind of alternate world futuristic version of the character(s). This one went so smoothly, the sketch served as a prelim, with no real changes in the finished cover. I love covers like that!

Adventures of Superman and related characters are trademark and copyright 2011 DC Comics.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Here's a neat color guide, done in the pre-computer coloring days, for the Superman books. This was also my debut as regular writer on this title, after John Byrne had left the books to return to Marvel. I HAD written a previous issue, but that had been intended for that year's Adventures of Superman Annual, and repurposed for a single issue when the schedule shifted. A side note on this one, is that the printed cover was adjusted, at the request of the comics code, to remove the blood, and shorten the needle so it didn't touch skin. All reasonable requests for a book that was done for "all ages." The Code was generally touchy, when it came to any kind of needles.

Adventures of Superman, and all related characters are trademark and copyright 2011 by DC Comics.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Here's an example of the stage before painting a cover-- this tracing paper full sized prelim, which was transferred to the art board and then painted. I drew this based on the cover sketch, which had been done first for editorial approval.

Power of Shazam and all characters are trademark and copyright 2011 DC Comics

This is a tight marker tracing paper prelim that I then transferred to art board and painted, for a Superman Earth Day special, written by Roger Stern, pencilled by Kerry Gammill, and inked by Dennis Janke, in the early 90's, I believe. This was a fun cover to do, and I think I painted the actual cover in gouache, for a nice retro feel.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Here's another color guide, done for the mechanical color separation process in comics, prior to computer coloring.This is a favorite cover of mine, as it's always fun to draw Kirby creations, like the four armed terror!

Superman and all related characters are trademark and copyright 2011, DC Comics

Friday, September 30, 2011

Here's a cover design I did, one of many, for Dark Horse, back in the mid 1990's, when they were building their own super-hero universe. Pretty sure I was approached by Barbara Kesel (Randall) who was one of the architects, to do some covers, and I obliged. It was a great and exciting time to be a comics fan, though hard on the wallet, with all the books coming from various companies. These characters had promise, and I still wonder why they couldn't find a niche in the super-hero landscape.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Another color guide, this one with a cool color scheme, due to Gangbusters costume, against blue and black. As I try to tell folks, it's not how many airbrushed variations you use, it's about the basic color choices, that make for a striking cover. I honestly believe we do better with less, and are more creative trying to get more out of a limited palette, than with an endless number of color variations to choose from.

Superman and all related characters are trademark and copyright DC Comics 2011

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Here's another cover color guide, from a really fun period of my time on the Superman books. For starters, this was a story involving Kirby's Guardian character, and the Cadmus labs, and I had just started writing as well as drawing it, a few months earlier. Enjoy!

Adventures of Superman, and all related characters shown
here are trademark and copyright DC Comics 2011

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Hey, this is another color guide I did back in my Superman days, when you had to spell out color combinations with a code, so the color separator could do what is done now in Photoshop! This cover was done as an homage to a great Neal Adams cover from the 70's, and if memory serves, the color was also meant to follow that of the original.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Here's another color guide I painted, for the Superman books in the early 90's. These were done to spell out the color formulas for the hand-separated printing plates, before the days of Photoshop for separating colors for the printer.

Monday, September 5, 2011

This prelim was done 6 x 8 1/2, mainly to establish the perspective of the Green Lantern graveyard, because the perspective points would have been unwieldy on a full sized art board! I adjusted a lot, in photoshop, and printed this out in blueline onto 2 ply strathmore drawing paper, to ink. The finished art is below.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Here's a new prelim, from a recent JSA issue, done because I just needed to work out that one fight scene and get the characters in there that the writer (Marc Guggenheim) wanted. While it slows down my pace to do these, they are a great help with multiple characters, all using their powers or whatnot.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

This was done in advance of drawing the cover for Capitol Distributing's monthly catalog, promoting the Power of Shazam series. Once the sketch was approved, I drew the cover, or flip cover, I can't recall.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

I did this many years back, and though it has faded a bit, it still looks okay to me. I recall doing this on a weekend day, to experiment with Dr Martin's watercolor dyes. Fast and bold, using photo ref from a magazine, I did okay capturing the actors, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Alec Guinness, though I wish I'd spent more time on the layout. Enjoy!
Artwork copyright Jerry Ordway 2011, Star Wars and characters are tm Lucasfilm Ltd.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Here's a painting I did back in 1979, inspired by the movie. I did this as line art, and then made a blueline board, thinking I would lay the linework over the color image. Well, I glazed the board, and painted this with oils instead, letting some linework in blueline show through. I like parts of this, but not all. But it's a snap shot in my art development.

Monday, August 8, 2011

Hey, I just jogged my memory recently, by, oddly enough, watching "Newsies" with my family. It connects to the DC Comics storyline, The Death of Superman, in a strange way. The way? I keep mistaking it for the reason the Death of Superman existed. The movie I want to remember is 1993's "Swing Kids," also starring young Christian Bale. That movie is the reason Superman died, in the comics, rather than getting married to lois Lane.
Anyhow, as I remember this, we, the Superman writers at that time (Dan Jurgens, Roger Stern, Louise Simonson and myself), had plotted out broad strokes for the many Superman titles, in conjunction with editor Mike Carlin, and associate Dan Thorsland, leading up to the wedding of Superman and Lois. We would chart out the rough outlines for over a year in advance, really, always leaving room for changes as the work started on a given issue. The wedding was scheduled for Adventures of Superman#500, far in the future. Somewhere in there, word came down that ABC was interested in doing a TV series called Lois and Clark. The possibility arose, of saving the comic book wedding, to do as a true tie-in to the show, a cross promotion. A great marketing tool to feed a potentially huge audience to comic book stores! The execs were developing the show with Thomas Carter as the perfect showrunner/ producer, based on his track record on tv with Hill Street Blues, The White Shadow, all great character driven shows. It would be a gritty drama, with an emphasis on the newspaper stuff, and the stories the reporters chased down. Sounded great to us, but suddenly we hear that Mr. Carter was going off to make the feature film "Swing Kids," and we were left scrambling to substitute a storyline for the wedding, knowing that the show was being delayed, the wedding had to be pushed back. We had to save the comic book wedding for the TV show. So we suddenly had a free slate, and somehow or other, the greatest comic hero met his death by our hands. Maybe a bit of spite found its way into our thinking, I can't say for sure.
Thomas Carter would have been terrific on Lois and Clark, but that never came to be either. It certainly would have been a different show, more gritty and real. As it happened, the show worked in a frothy, "Moonlighting" vein as well.

line art by Dan Jurgens & Jerry Ordway

from the Death of Superman Omnibus edition, tm & copyright DC Comic 2011